I Write Poems About Commuters Who'll Never Know
The 7:15 local is full of protagonists minding their own business.
For three years I have been writing poems about strangers on the 7:15 Virar local, and until last August... not one of them knew.
My notebook holds forty-one people who have no idea they are literature.
It started as a survival tactic. If you have never taken a Mumbai local at peak hour, understand that privacy does not exist there, but attention does. You stand pressed against six other human beings, your face centimetres from a man's collar, and you have two options: go somewhere else inside your head, or actually look at the people you are touching. Most commuters choose the first. I was too broke that year for headphones that worked, so I chose the second.
The first poem was about a man I called Tiffin Uncle. Every morning he boarded at Borivali with a four-tier steel tiffin, and every morning he held it on his lap like a pet and never once opened it. Fifty-something, ironed shirt, a wedding ring gone loose on the finger. I invented an entire life to explain the tiffin. He was carrying lunch to a wife in a hospital. He was carrying his late wife's recipes, cooked by his own hands, to eat alone at a desk because the smell was the last thing left. I wrote it in eleven lines standing up, elbow pinned, notebook against a stranger's back, and I remember thinking... this is the most alive I have felt in months.
After that I couldn't stop. The college girl who read the same page of the same physics textbook for two weeks, eyes not moving, and then one Tuesday cried without sound from Andheri to Dadar while the whole compartment politely became blind. The man who did his tie in the reflection of the window at exactly Jogeshwari, using the dark of a passing wall as his mirror. The woman with mehndi fading on her hands, a new bride commuting back to work, watching her own palms like the pattern was a country she was leaving.
I gave them all names. I gave them all wrong lives, probably. That is the confession at the heart of this: finding inspiration in strangers is one part observation and three parts trespass. You see a fraction of a person, forty minutes of their worst hour, and you build a whole human around it. Some nights I felt like a thief who steals only photographs of things.
A friend who writes proper fiction told me to stop being precious about it. “Every writer does this,” she said. “You're just doing it with witnesses.”
The Notebook Incident
Last August I fell asleep on the return train. Deep, jaw-open, fourteen-hour-workday sleep. When I woke up at Malad, my bag was on my lap, my phone was in my pocket, and my notebook was four passengers away... open... being read aloud.
Tiffin Uncle was reading it. The actual man.
Three years of taking his train and I had never learned that his voice was gentle and his reading glasses lived in his shirt pocket. He was reading the poem about the tie man to the tie man, who was sitting right there, laughing so hard he had to hold the luggage rack.
I considered dying.
Mumbai locals offer many opportunities.
Instead I stood there while a compartment of strangers I had been secretly describing for three years passed my notebook down the line like prasad. It had fallen out of my bag, someone had opened it looking for a name to return it to, and found his own description instead. Word had travelled seat to seat faster than the train.
Here is what I expected... anger. A lecture about privacy. Possibly a slap with the notebook itself, which had a hard cover.
Here is what happened: corrections.
“The tiffin is for my grandson,” Tiffin Uncle said, finding me with his eyes. “Not a wife in a hospital. He studies near Churchgate. His mother, my daughter, we don't speak. The boy meets me on the platform for ten minutes and takes the dabba. That's the story. Yours was also good.”
The tie man wanted it on record that he owned a mirror, he just preferred the window. The physics girl was not there that evening, but a woman who knew her said she had passed the exam on the third attempt and I should update the poem. Somebody asked why there was nothing about him, and seemed genuinely wounded, and I promised him eleven lines by Friday.
I had spent three years thinking I was the only one paying attention, and the whole time the compartment had been reading me back.
They knew I got off at Malad. They knew I wrote with a pencil because pens leak in the crush. The bride with the mehndi, someone told me, used to say I looked like I was praying when I wrote. Forty-one people in my notebook, and I was in theirs the whole time, filed under some name I will never know.
The watcher on the 7:15. The praying man with the pencil.
What the Train Taught Me
Everything I know about loneliness I learned in a compartment where nobody is ever alone. It took me years to write about that particular loneliness directly, the kind you feel pressed against six warm bodies, and when I finally did, it was the physics girl's poem that opened the door. Crying without sound in a crowd that pretends not to see you is either the loneliest thing in the world or the safest... and I still cannot decide which.
Tiffin Uncle's real story went into a new poem, with his blessing and his corrections, and I entered it in a monthly poetry contest under his actual name as dedication. Prakash Joshi. He asked for a printout for the grandson. I gave him three, because the trains eat paper.
The strangest afterlife of the whole episode is that I started reading other unknown writers differently. I spent an evening on a page of profiles of writers nobody had heard yet and realised every one of them was somebody's Tiffin Uncle: a full person compressed into a fraction, waiting for one reader to fall asleep at the right moment and get caught paying attention.
The 7:15 is still my train. The compartment still mostly ignores me, because Mumbai's mercy is its indifference, but now there is a difference in the ignoring. The tie man nods. A window seat sometimes becomes mysteriously available near Borivali, and I have learned not to ask.
Yesterday a young man stood pressed against the door, writing something in his phone with his thumb, glancing up at an old woman counting coins from a knotted handkerchief.
I know that glance. I invented that glance.
I looked away and let him have her. There are enough protagonists on the 7:15 for everybody, and anyway, somewhere in his phone, I am probably already eleven lines long.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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